Why Edwards won, McDonnell lost

Why is Bob McDonnell looking at years in a federal prison while John Edwards is walking free?

The federal government dragged both men into court on charges stemming from their role in public life: Edwards for alleged campaign finance violations relating to his mistress and McDonnell for receiving gifts from a Virginia businessman. Both cases involved large sums of money and uncomfortable discussion of the politicians’ private lives. And they contributed to the notion that politicians operate in a sphere far removed from that of working Americans.

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Going into Edwards’ trial, his reputation was in tatters over his highly-publicized affair with videographer Rielle Hunter. Edwards’s life became fare for the national tabloids, which repeatedly noted that his dalliance took place as his wife Elizabeth was dying of cancer.

McDonnell, by contrast, was a relatively well-liked and successful governor whose reputation took a hit late in his term as word emerged of the gifts he and his family received from Star Scientific CEO Jonnie Williams Jr. Even as the details of the federal investigation spilled out late last year, McDonnell retained the support of half of Virginia voters.

Juries in federal courthouses about 200 miles apart in sleepy, mid-sized cities in the border South considered the evidence. But the results were wildly different: McDonnell was convicted of 11 felonies, while Edwards’s jury acquitted him on one count and hung on five others, prompting the feds to drop the case.

Here’s POLITICO’s guide to six ways McDonnell’s defense went sour while Edwards’s succeeded:

1) It all came down to the Rolex

McDonnell was caught with hand in the cookie jar — up to his wrist.

Unlike Edwards, McDonnell was seen as personally profiting from the largesse of a political backer, while the money prosecutors argued was chipped in to aid the ex-senator never went to him directly.

McDonnell could not escape evidence like the photo showing him smiling while showing off the $6,500 watch. His claims that he didn’t know Williams paid for it didn’t seem to persuade jurors. The pictures of him riding around in Williams’s Ferrari didn’t help his defense much either.

Prosecutors argued that the value of the expenses involved in Edwards’s case was about $900,000 — far higher than the $165,000 McDonnell and his family were accused of taking. But the money two friends of Edwards put out went to cover expenses incurred by Hunter to stay at lavish hotels and travel by private jet. It was also paid out when Edwards was a presidential candidate, not a senator.

“I talked to multiple Edwards jurors who were telling me: ‘He never touched the money.’ Here, you have indisputable visual evidence of McDonnell being on the receiving end of the benefit,” said Hampton Dellinger, a trial attorney who works in North Carolina and Washington, D.C. “That doesn’t necessarily end the legal inquiry but for jurors’ visceral gut reactions to the cases, it could be a good distinction.”

One McDonnell case juror said in a post-trial interview that it was clear the gifts McDonnell and his family took were directly linked to his public office. Kathleen Carmody told the Washington Post that jurors asked themselves: “Would the McDonnells have received these gifts if Bob McDonnell weren’t governor?…. [The] facts speak for themselves.”

Edwards’s legal team, headed by D.C. lawyer Abbe Lowell, argued that the ex-senator would have tried to hush up his affair with Hunter — and her ensuing pregnancy — even if he wasn’t running for president. Prosecutors said it was implausible that friendship alone would prompt anyone to pay up $900,000 to cover another person’s extramarital affair, but some of the payments did continue after Edwards’s presidential campaign was clearly doomed.

“Edwards was able to put in jurors’ minds whether the cover-up of the affair would have taken place regardless of whether he was running for president, that he wasn’t as much trying to save his candidacy as save his marriage,” Dellinger said.

2) When it’s all about sex, jurors recoil

Both cases offered awkward testimony about the prominent political couples’ marriages. In the McDonnell case, their union was on the table from the outset since both the governor and his wife, Maureen, were criminally charged. But the focus on marital strife came from the defense, with Maureen’s lawyer arguing at the outset of the trial that the couple’s marriage was “broken.”

At the Edwards trial, the ex-senator’s extramarital affair was the central theme and a frequent topic of discussion. Jurors even heard about Elizabeth Edwards ripping her blouse open to expose her scars from breast cancer surgery. In a page torn from the playbook used to fight President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, John Edwards’s defense suggested the federal government had spent millions investigating the tabloid tale of whether a man had a secret love child.

Prosecutors undoubtedly wanted to make Edwards seem like a bad person, but the focus on the personal may have backfired, fueling questions about the public interest served by the case.